The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents: 20 Years of Research on Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics,

The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents provides a comprehensive overview of the research fields of Embodied Conversational Agents;Intelligent Virtual Agents;and Social Robotics. Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs);whether virtually or physically embodied;are autonomous agents that are able to perceive an environment including people or other agents;reason;decide how to interact;and express attitudes such as emotions;engagement;or empathy. They are capable of interacting with people and one another in a socially intelligent manner using multimodal communicative behaviors;with the goal to support humans in various domains.

Written by international experts in their respective fields;the book summarizes research in the many important research communities pertinent for SIAs;while discussing current challenges and future directions. The handbook provides easy access to modeling and studying SIAs for researchers and students;and aims at further bridging the gap between the research communities involved.

In two volumes;the book clearly structures the vast body of research. The first volume starts by introducing what is involved in SIAs research;in particular research methodologies and ethical implications of developing SIAs. It further examines research on appearance and behavior;focusing on multimodality. Finally;social cognition for SIAs is investigated using different theoretical models and phenomena such as theory of mind or pro-sociality. The second volume starts with perspectives on interaction;examined from different angles such as interaction in social space;group interaction;or long-term interaction. It also includes an extensive overview summarizing research and systems of human-agent platforms and of some of the major application areas of SIAs such as education;aging support;autism;and games.

《社交互動代理手冊》提供了對「具身對話代理」、「智能虛擬代理」和「社交機器人」研究領域的全面概述。社交互動代理（SIAs）無論是虛擬還是實體化，都是能夠感知環境（包括人或其他代理），進行推理、決策如何互動，並表達情感、參與度或共情等態度的自主代理。它們能夠以多模態的溝通行為與人類和其他代理以社交智能的方式互動，旨在支持人類在各個領域中的需求。

本書由各自領域的國際專家撰寫，總結了與SIAs相關的許多重要研究社群的研究，同時討論了當前的挑戰和未來的方向。該手冊為研究人員和學生提供了對建模和研究SIAs的便捷途徑，並旨在進一步縮小相關研究社群之間的差距。

該書分為兩卷，清晰地結構化了龐大的研究內容。第一卷首先介紹了SIAs研究所涉及的內容，特別是研究方法論和開發SIAs的道德影響。它進一步探討了外觀和行為的研究，重點放在多模態上。最後，使用不同的理論模型和現象（如心智理論或親社會性）研究了SIAs的社會認知。第二卷從不同角度探討互動的觀點，例如社交空間中的互動、群體互動或長期互動。它還包括一個廣泛的概述，總結了人-代理平台的研究和系統，以及SIAs的一些主要應用領域，如教育、老年支援、自閉症和遊戲。